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Thursday, 12 April 2007

After having a row with my friend about Twitter and its usage, there's something to learn.

The way Twitter works, or work efficiently, for eg you have 5 friends who only YOU choose to have your feeds of the Twitter either on the phone or pc. The 'beauty' of this beast is its speed and it's instant. Perhaps in a case of ' I need information on this' or in urgent recruitment of people/talent to do the job. If my friends/followers check their phone/pc and receive my message then they can act/respond instantly.

I was thinking how on earth is this technology evolutionary? Well the argument, my friend's point of view, is no other technology can do this up to this point in time, although IM I think pretty much do the job. Another point is that you limit who can subscribe to your Twitter and whether they have access to phone/pc at the time of communication, they can respond right away. There's a chance you can get the text update FREE on your mobile. For UK number: it's +447781488126

I asked, yes this is all wonderful but do you ever think about people at the receiving end? perhaps that person's preferred method of contact is calling, text, or email or whatever. The answer is of course all participants must share the same enthus and idea to make it happen.

Ah....here is the drawback....people can decide whether they want to join your Twitter updates or not....so you can't really impose anything on them. From a marketing point of view, you have a list of well targeted consumers/audiences who would potentially buy in our products/services.

So for PR, various applications, and please comment if you can think of more ideas I love to hear, from this Twitter magic, are:

Internal communication

Freelance PR

Crisis communication

Updates on current events faster than Feeds/Emails

Personal PR: use for practitioner own's benefit such as bloggers like Drew

1 comment:

I've done more research recently about Twitter, and I think that it can prove to be a useful PR tool.

In my point of view Twitter could be a very effective channel of communication in case of a crisis. As Virginia Tech's incident proved, an early-alert system is often lacking, and Twitter could be one. If Virginia Tech used such a system many students and professors would have been informed, and maybe the massacre would have been avoided.

I also agree that it could be an effective channel of Personal PR, and the politicians John Edwards and Alan Johnson seem to have realized that.

Even though a company has started using it as a channel for distributing press releases, I don't know if that could be effective, as Twitter is not a push-mechanism.

Well...Lets see what Twitter holds for us and the PR practice in the future.